On June 25–26, 1876, near the Little Big Horn river in Montana, General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry were destroyed by a coalition of Lakota and Cheyenne Indians led by Crazy Horse. The battle represented the last high point of the Native American resistance to white invasion at the end of the 19th century. In U.S. history, the battle has always represented an especially humiliating defeat. Cinema Westerns have represented the battle many times. Usually the question for Westerns is whether to represent a sympathetic Custer, as Errol Flynn’s character in They Died with Their Boots On (1941), a film intended to inspire patriotism as World War II was approaching, or whether to represent Custer as new Western history usually interprets him—as a brutal Indian killer.
See also INDIANS.
Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema. Paul Varner. 2012.